7 minute read
Local soccer club unites the county
ALL FOR ONE
AND ONE FOR ALL
ALL FOR ONE
AND ONE FOR ALL
Local Soccer Club Unites the County
By: Kelley White
For the past five years, DeKalb County United Soccer Club has been on the up and up, forging a path for future generations in the community. On their fifth anniversary, President John Hall is reflecting on the years he has spent bringing his club to life. “The idea came back in late 2016. We had a number of players from the area I knew that were going to play at a club in Aurora at a sort of semi-professional level and I thought that was pretty neat,” Hall said. “I thought, why not here?”
After some research into starting his own club, Hall sought answers drawing supporters from the local community. “The dream at the time was trying to figure out how to bring people from DeKalb, Sycamore, NIU and Genoa all together on a Saturday night to support this thing that we grew together in DeKalb County,” Hall said. “We wanted to really unite the community through soccer and that evolved our mission in United Through Soccer.” Hall wanted to shine a light on local rivalries and unite communities through soccer. “For me, it was how to get rivalries to lay down their swords,” Hall said. “We wanted it to be bigger than the rivalry – we’re all in it together.” But starting a brand-new athletic club is not an easy feat. The foremost challenge, Hall said, was securing a means to fund to venture. “It’s a business in many ways, it’s a very giving organization and we’re not in it to make money for ourselves, we’re volunteers,” Hall said. “We’re doing it because we believe it’s a club that can provide value to our community, but we needed to figure out how to raise the money to rent fields, pay coaches, pay referees and run a soccer club with marketing and those kinds of things.” For such a tight-knit community, the answer was rather simple – outreach to local businesses. “We wanted to create a platform to partner with local businesses that would be proud to work with us, which translated right into marketing,” Hall said. “For businesses, we want to promote their services and help get them more clients, helping their marketing as well as ours. We started gathering startup money and building up a brand that we thought, with our logo and things like that, people would identify with. The more businesses we can tie into our family, the better.” The club’s emblem features a corn husk in the shape of a soccer ball, a nod to the region’s signature reputation for being an agricultural heavy hitter. From the beginning, Hall has made good on his goals and gone above and beyond to ensure the future of the Club. “I and many others have put a lot of work into getting this club to our fiveyear anniversary, our five-year birthday,” Hall said. “Sustainability from a financial standpoint is huge. We want to build the types of relationships that make us part of the fabric of what this county has offer so that businesses will support, people will show up to games, and players will want to play for us. The second part of sustainability is the volunteerism and having a group of
passionate people that not only want to show up for games but ask what they can do for the club.” For the club, soccer is more than just a game. It’s a conduit for uniting the community. “We’ve put an increase and emphasis on community outreach, very rarely will you hear me or anyone else talk about the actual soccer,” Hall said. “That is sort of secondary to what our club is about. Where maybe another organization might have two or three fundraisers a year, we have between seven to 10 home games – those are our fundraising events.” Hall is over the moon for his large pool of volunteers, recognizing their hard work as part of the lifeblood of his organization. “Having the people that are willing to step up and do the hours all year long is critical,” Hall said. Sports teams evoke a sort of romanticism in their communities, becoming a source of hope and loyalty. It is no different in DeKalb County. “Everything on the field is fun and all, but I really think the fact we created something people want to be a part of is amazing,” Hall said. “We have lifetime memberships for sale, and we have lifetime members that have bought those. People buy memberships every year to support us, and people buy our merchandise to support us. There seems to be a want for this group to exist in the community, and that’s our biggest accomplishment, that people seem to have found a way to support us.” Hall is grateful about the simple fact the DeKalb County United is still standing as an organization after its first five years. “We’re still here, and we’ve somehow managed to find and connect with a group of businesses and people that want us to be here,” Hall said. “The community has embraced us. We had a terrible season last year, but the community said, ‘Let’s go again.’ The results on the field didn’t matter – what we do in the community does, and that’s not to say that I don’t want to win, but it has not been our main focus to this point as it won’t make us sustainable long-term.” Drawing from his own childhood, Hall imagines that the community’s youths view the club as an opportunity to do what they love and create memories with a team. The players themselves remain steadfast in their support of the club as a whole, Hall said. He credits the club with offering players a professional-style experience with quality coaching, training and opponents. “It’s as good as we can provide. It’s a professional club run on an amateur budget,” Hall said. “We don’t pay the players, but we want them to feel like professionals, we want them to bond as teammates, we want them to really come together and realize this club is not just 11 guys on the field. This is a community and again, I think they like it because we have a lot of players that want to play for us.” On the sports side, DeKalb United has an impressive lineup of teams to their name. Hall calls the Men’s First Team a semi-pro experience. The men’s reserve team roster is filled with players who are training to step up to the next level. The women’s under-23 team, which competes in the Illinois Women’s Soccer League, won the league title during their first season last year. In January, DeKalb County United announced the creation of the DKCU Academy Youth Players. “The Kishwaukee Valley Soccer Club and the Northern Illinois Soccer Club came to us last fall and said they wanted to merge, and they thought it would be really great to become the DKCU Academy,” Hall said. “We have a full range of players from very young up to adults. In the spirit of uniting the community through soccer, what better way than uniting two opposing youth clubs to actually come together and fly our flag while providing opportunities for young kids to be inspired by adult athletes?” In the future, Hall hopes to win more trophies to increase the community’s morale with a winning legacy as a sports organization. “When a team is winning, everyone feels good, and when we had a down year for the first time it made us, as a staff, question everything,” Hall said. “We have a renewed focus on the on-field product and we’re not going to let slip the community stuff, but we need to address the winning. We brought in a sporting director who is in charge of players and development, we have a new head coach, and we’re really excited for the trajectory of the on-field specifics. We hope that once we start winning more, it will pull in even more supporters.” Hall said DKCU is striding toward the future with hope and determination. “I want to keep the pedal down on community engagement. I want to continue to do those things more frequently and continue to get our name, brand and mission in front of new organizations and new companies to really make this the biggest, coolest thing it can be in DeKalb County.” For information and to stay up-to-date on the latest DeKalb County United happenings, visit www.dkcunited.com.
